This was great fun to revisit today so I thought I’d share it here. Neil Slater hired me at North Texas initially as a jazz trombonist and composer. It was in this capacity that I truly thrived and enjoyed reliving the magic of my earlier days there as a student.
One of the fun things that I did in those years was to get some of my UNT faculty folks together and make this recording. Some of the Cats didn’t enjoy it …but they tended to not enjoy anything, so… whatever🙄😁 Even on great sessions like this one, such is quite often the case ‘behind the scenes.”
And so it goes…
I know that I sure enjoyed it! Ed Soph was one of my all time favorite drummers and we communicated on this piece like we could read each other’s minds. Fred sounded wonderful on nylon string acoustic guitar, setting just the right bossa~vibe. Stefan is a brilliant pianist and a true joy to work with…and a dear friend❤️ And Lynn Seaton is simply one the nicest folks I’ve ever known. Not only a gentle soul, and a true mensch, but one of the great masters of the bass.
The concept for this project was great fun. I chose a bunch of ‘non-jazz’ tunes and reimagined them as jazz standards. This particular one was one of the more stark and outrageous choices; I took the great Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters song “In Your
Honor” and rewrote it as a chill bossa nova Jobim-style.
The original is an angst ridden screamer (VERY cool piece of music BTW) so I added some harmonic fripperies and some what-not and came up with this opposite-world wee offering. I don’t know if Dave ever heard it… but if he ever does, I want him to know that it was written in his honor.😍
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